Case Analysis II

Instructions

Format

Hardcopy of the following Case Analysis, assigned Thursday 3/28, is due in class Tuesday 4/4 as described below. As before, I do not mind students working on the case analyses in groups--it is, in fact, encouraged--but your case analysis must be your own. Be sure that your case analysis is as complete, well-expressed, clear, and precise as you can make it. This means in particular that you anticipate and meet any objections in the analysis. This case analysis is worth 100 points, as per the syllabus. If you have any question, puzzle, or require clarification, please do not hesitate to contact me (berkich@gmail.com; 3976, 944-2756). Finally, the following maximums and minimums must be scrupulously observed:

• No less than 10pt font.
• No less than 1.5 line spacing.
• No less than 1 inch margins on all sides.
• No more than two pages, one-side per page.
• Multiple pages must be stapled.
• The case analysis number and your name must appear at the top of the first page (there is no need for a title page, however.)

Note that these are maximums and minimums only. You may, for instance, write less than two pages or use greater than a 10pt font. That said, failure to observe these requirements will result in a score of 0 for the assignment.

Writing Advice

In light of the above admittedly serious constraints on the space available for your case analysis, it is extremely important that you excise any and all extraneous or redundant material. For example, the phrases "It can be argued that", "I claim that", "I think that", or their kin preceding a sentence add absolutely nothing to the sentence, take up valuable space, and are in fact wholly redundant. Of course it can be argued that, claimed that, or thought that, or you would never have written it!

Every word must count for answering the question. Philosophical writing is thus austere, but terribly precise. Such is its virtue. That said, writing philosophy can be jarring at first, especially for those who have labored and suffered under the delusional five-paragraph essay regime.

For additional advice on writing philosophy, I encourage you to study some of the advice linked from the Writing Philosophy page. Not all of the advice applies directly to these case analyses, to be sure. Nevertheless, there is much sound and helpful advice to be had about writing in general and writing philosophy in particular.

Above all, bear in mind that in a good case analysis,

• Arguments are clearly stated in such a way that the conclusion and assumptions would be obvious to any student not taking this course.
• Assumptions are clearly justified whenever they are controversial.
• Theoretical assumptions (your theory of choice, typically) are stated explicitly and the resulting argument does not deviate from these assumptions.
• Steps taken in the course of an argument are clear in such a way that any student not taking this course would be able to follow them.
• Wherever applicable, the arguments found in the various texts we have read should be utilized but should be restated in such a way that anyone not taking the course could understand the argument.

A few further comments may help.

First, the requirement that you clearly state the arguments does not imply that you should put them into the formally-valid-numbered-lines form that we adopt in class. Of course, that is absolutely the clearest way to state an argument. But it is also rather difficult to do for people who have not had a course in logic. So for these cases we strongly recommend that you write your arguments in paragraph form in such a way that the steps taken in the argument from the assumptions to the conclusion are clear.

Second, if you take as your theoretical assumption Hedonic Act Utilitarianism, say, it is mandatory that you not suddenly start arguing about the unhappy consequences of an action as if you had assumed Eudaimonic Act Utilitarianism. In other words, stick to the theory you've assumed.

Third, you should strive to write as clearly as possible. Try to avoid confusing your reader with complicated sentences and disconnected thoughts. Remember, you're gaining skills you will someday have to use. One of those skills is the ability to express your ideas in such a way that anyone can understand them. This does not mean that you will be graded on grammar per se. You should nevertheless strive as far as possible to express yourself clearly and effectively. If, in grading these cases, we are unable to understand what it is you are trying to say, you will not be given the benefit of the doubt. We will not read between the lines or otherwise assume you meant something more astute than what you actually wrote.

Fourth, it is important that your understanding of the issues as they are spelled out in the articles be reflected in your own arguments. Some very smart people have thought long and hard about these problems, and you should learn to rely--critically, of course--on what they have to say.

Selfieness

(from the 2019 National Ethics Bowl)

While emergency workers offered aid to a woman critically injured by a train at a station in northern Italy, a young man in white shorts stepped up to the platform, held his fingers in a “V for victory” sign, and snapped a selfie.

Voted Word of the Year by Oxford Dictionary in 2013, “selfie” denotes a picture one takes of oneself. Self-portraits are not new, of course. Humans have created pictures of themselves since cave drawing. The only change over centuries has been the medium and publication format.

Today smartphone owners around the globe snap digital self-portraits on a daily basis with seemingly little consideration for whether doing so may be morally inappropriate. When tourists take selfies at sites associated with evil, like the monuments to the Trail of Tears in the southeastern United States or the village of My Lai in Vietnam, it is questionable whether the ethics of doing so is even a fleeting concern. In 2017, a firestorm of criticism erupted around a figure of Hitler in a wax museum in Indonesia, in part because so many people wanted selfies with the figure.

According to Giorgio Lambri, the journalist who photographed the selfie-taker at the train station accident, "We have completely lost a sense of ethics." Lambri himself wrote about the experience in the Italian newspaper, Liberta, under the headline, "The barbarism you don’t expect: the 'self' in front of a tragedy," and later posted on his Facebook page about the young man’s apparent lack of moral compass.

Use Kantian Ethical Theory to answer the following questions raised by this case: 1) Was it morally wrong for the man described in the first paragraph to take a selfie as he did? 2) Would it be morally wrong to take a selfie at the site of a plane-crash, like the recent one in Ethiopia? 3) And, finally, would it be morally wrong to take a selfie at Auschwitz-Birkenau?